


Lessons in Silver Fox Crisis Management

by Siria



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:21:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22513921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: David is strategizing. Patrick is amused.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 35
Kudos: 248





	Lessons in Silver Fox Crisis Management

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trinityofone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/gifts).



> Thanks to sheafrotherdon for reading over this for me; for trinityone, as a _Schitt's Creek_ -related bit of reciprocity.

It was Patrick’s morning to open up, which generally meant that he wouldn’t see David for at least the first two hours of his working day. David was very much not a morning person. This meant that walking up to the store twenty minutes before opening time to see the lights on, the sign turned to ‘open’, and David standing behind the counter wasn’t what Patrick would call usual.

“I am at the Rose Apothecary in _my_ universe, right?” Patrick said as he set his tea and breakfast bagel down on the counter. “You’re my David and not someone who just wandered here through a mirror. Do I need to grow a goatee?”

“Har har,” David said flatly, angling his cheek for a kiss which he accepted with all the equanimity of a monarch who was accustomed to being curtseyed to. It would have been annoying, if it wasn’t so endearing. “A guy can’t show up a little early to his own business?”

“A guy could. _You_ , though…” Patrick said, leaning against the counter and picking up his tea to take a cautious sip. When tea was brewed by Twyla, you could never be quite sure of the temperature or the legality of the plants used when you first went in. “What are you working on?”

David was hunched over a sheet of paper, on which he’d sketched out what looked like a series of graphs surrounded by blocks of his dense, cramped cursive. From this distance, all Patrick could make out were a couple of words: PRECEDENT?? and STATEMENT?? “If you must know,” David said loftily, “I am strategizing.”

“Huh,” Patrick said, reaching for his breakfast bagel. He probably needed protein in his system to face this, whatever this was, even if that protein came in the form of rubbery egg laced with the café’s off-brand hot sauce. David had that mulish look on his face, the kind he wore whenever there were disputes about plungers. “Strategizing. Funny, because I seem to remember how three whole weeks ago, we came up with a comprehensive business strategy for the next two years. There were spreadsheets. You remember the spreadsheets, David? The ones you made me painstakingly custom colour-code to match the store’s aesthetic?”

“This isn’t _business_ ,” David hissed. “This is personal. And since I couldn’t sleep, I decided I needed to come up with a plan of attack.”

Patrick set his bagel back down. “God, did another motel customer die?”

“No!” David said. “This is entirely a personal issue. So if you could just let m—”

“David.” Patrick had a realization. David had been very carefully keeping his face mostly angled away from Patrick from the moment he’d walked into the store, so that Patrick never saw him in more than half-profile. Ever since he’d started dating David, Patrick had learned a lot more than he’d ever thought possible about ‘finding your light’ in selfies, but it was 8:45 on a Tuesday morning and there wasn’t a camera in sight. “What’s going on?”

“Ugh,” David said, letting his head roll back on his shoulders so that he could direct an even more aggrieved sigh at the ceiling. “Fine. Okay. But only because you’re _forcing_ me.”

“Sure,” Patrick said, amused.

David turned to face him with all the enthusiasm of the convicted walking out to meet the hangman. Patrick had been expecting a repeat of the poison oak incident, but instead he saw… well, nothing. David’s face of course, but it was dear and familiar to him in just the same way that it was always dear and familiar.

“Okay, you’re going to have to explain this one to me in small words,” Patrick said after a moment. “And no analogies based on the lyrics of Mariah Carey.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” David said, pointing at his face.

“Have you… switched… moisturizer?” Patrick said slowly. Maybe he was in a mirror universe. He couldn’t see any changes, but David was really particular about his skin-care routine. There were multiple stages, and none of them involved soap.

“What? Why would you say that?” David clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Is there something wrong with—”

Patrick sighed. “David.”

“ _Oh_ my god!” David folded his arms, squeezing his eyes closed, clearly steeling himself. “Fine. So maybe I was getting ready for bed last night and noticed that I… I have my first white eyebrow hair.”

Patrick stood there in silence until David eventually opened his eyes again and looked at Patrick with an air of quivering trepidation. With great deliberation, and maintaining eye contact with David the whole time, Patrick picked up his tea again and took a long, slow, deliberative sip. “Okay. And the graphs and the strategizing…”

“Do I tweeze?” David blurted out. “Because that’s an efficient solution for one hair, but what happens if the grey spreads and I’ve got to keep tweezing? Before you know it, I’m Christina Aguilera in 2003 and that is a path I refuse to go down. Tinting is another option, but where can I turn to for a custom dye formula here, hmm? My options are _box dye_ and if I get it just a bit wrong I will end up with one-dimensional, ashy brows, and that is just a bad look, like someone going out in direct sunlight with a fully contoured face. So that leaves me with trying to make this look like a deliberate choice, instead of, you know—”

“Okay. Lots of options, I get it.” Patrick took a few steps forward until he was right in David’s space and clapped his free hand to David’s shoulder. David made a persecuted little sigh and then slumped forward into Patrick’s space. This close, if he peered carefully, Patrick could indeed see a lone white hair in the middle of David’s left brow. Not the kind of thing he’d have drawn a graph about, himself, but Patrick had long ago realized that he and David had what you might term pretty different reactions to things. “Have you considered this other one?”

“ _Ugh_. What?” Patrick still never failed to be amazed at how someone as handsome as David could pull such elastic faces.

“Maybe it’s fine just the way it is,” Patrick said. “Maybe you don’t need to do anything to it, or find a way to frame it, or do anything other than just let it be.”

“That would clearly be madness,” David said.

“Uh huh,” Patrick said, biting back a grin. “Well, I like it.” He ran his hand over to the nape of David’s neck and tugged him forward so that Patrick could press a soft kiss to his mouth and another one to the offending eyebrow. “I think it’s cute. Distinguished.”

“It is _not_ cute,” David huffed, his expression caught between a reflexive scowl and a smile of improbably shy delight. Patrick loved him. “Nothing about this is cute.”

“I think every part of you is cute,” Patrick said, turning to pick up his bagel. If he focused, he should still be able to finish his breakfast and deal with all the outstanding vendor emails before the local Stitch ‘n Bitch group showed up at 10. “And you’ll just have to deal with that.”

“Just so you know, saying heart-warming things like that to me is a low blow.”

“I do fight dirty,” Patrick said, heading for the back office. “Probably because of how I’m the scrappy young thing in this relationship, and you—”

“Oh my _God_.”

“—are the worldly silver fox who’s leading me astray.”

“Five years! It’s just a five year difference! And it’s _one_ hair.”

Patrick laughed, and with a frustrated noise David balled up the graph paper and lobbed it in his general direction. Maybe there was no such thing as a usual morning when it came to working with David Rose. Patrick was pretty okay with that.


End file.
